Simple. Not having a driver in the car. The driver is the only part of Uber I don't like. I feel like if I make them wait 20 seconds they could ding my rating. If I have kids with me, I hate having to get their carseat buckled, knowing the driver probably doesn't want kids in their car anyway. I hate the awkward silence. I hate listening to their shitty music. At no fault of their own, they are the only weak link in the Uber chain. Everything gets better for me if there just isn't a person waiting on me the whole time.
I'd sell my cars in a heartbeat if "Uber minus the driver" existed and was cheaper than owning a car.
Explain how a car with a human driver will be cheaper or have price parity with a car that requires no paid human driver. The driver is the most expensive part of every ride. And that's before tip.
Uber outsourced they capital intensive fleet of cars to the drivers. Waymo has no such luxury.
But the main point is: if there is no need to compete in price, companies won't do it. There is no other company offering driverless rides and even if Google were to have huge margins on every ride, they wouldn't lower prices.
Happens all the time that companies literally just choose to not compete in price because people don't have options or just have accepted a specific price level.
Yeah, manufactured goods aren't exactly known to increase in price as production scales. This is a very temporary anomaly. Cars with drivers are on the precipice of becoming extinct, save for specialty needs and the wealthy.
I have to pay to store my manually-driven car 90% of the day, because there's nothing else it could be doing while it waits for me.
A driverless car can very easily do things and make money while I'm waiting for it.
In some scenarios, people rent out their owned cars during the day to avoid this massive opportunity cost, but I doubt that will be the most efficient model.
In what other asset class ever has it made sense for the capital owners to be an extremely long tail of people, rather than a large corporate owner? Especially something as high velocity and fungible as cars.
Taxis/uber etc. are all built as "regular cards". It requires at least 2 people in there. How often is actually more than 1 person in a car? Wasn't that like 2/3 of all drives?
Now let's assume we have specialized cars for just a single person - that saves a lot of material, fuel, and also (parking) space.
But that only works if you don't OWN the car, because if you own it, you might sometimes have to have passengers right? So you always get a big car that is not needed in 2/3 or so of the drives.
That aside, having another driver is annoying for various reasons (e.g. privacy).
How can anybody trust the US ever again? Trump completely ignored an existing free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that he himself signed.
You have to assume that the US is sane a maximum of four years in a row and in four years another Trump 2.0 will again be completely ignoring all their agreements.
In my opinion, the US cannot be trusted with any treaties ever again the way they currently are.
The GOP, not just Trump. Plenty of support for his "51st state" comments coming from within the administration, and from the broader GOP gallery.
And a whole contingent of Americans who don't seem to recognize this as a serious diplomatic concern. Look at the bulk of comments in this post trying to handwave this away as some kind of "trade dispute" or "irrational fear of ICE" or "Canadian dollar is low."
No, your president and his entire cabinet say they're going to annex our country. Gee, I wonder why we wouldn't travel there.
It’s funny that a country so wound up in national pride as the USA can’t see that an existential threat to your countries sovereignty triggers a deep emotional response.
People act as if it's a fluke, as if "if we could get back to how things were just before all this, things would stay better!". No, we don't want to drive off the cliff, but we do want back to that time we barged full speed past all the "road closed ahead" signs.
I don't think this is NIMBYism. The complaints are kind of reasonable and also, allowing a private company like Amazon do this most certainly is not something for the greater good. It's just good for Amazon.
Living in a North American city with power wires being above ground, I have had so many power outages in the last five year, it was kind of a crazy thing to get used to. My Pi would not deal well with power outages when running through the SD card and so I stopped using it.
I've had a raspberry pi and pihole going on the same SD card for approximately seven years now.
I also regularly reboot the pi by simply cycling power.
The solution was fairly simple. Send the linux log files to /dev/null (or whatever it is actually called, i.e. RAM) and disable query logging in pihole.
I ran it on an old laptop and never had issues. The extra ram and cpu + actual disk hd gave me ~99% uptime even after power outage no sd card corruption. Laptop auto rebooted on crash too.
Is that really true? I think life has become infinitely more convenient over the last few decades.
One can now order everything over the internet and not even leave the house. SO many errands that cost tons of time involved leaving the house and getting this or that. This is now all reduced to minutes on the phone or computer and the items will magically appear in front of your door.
Same with information search. Having the internet, google maps, etc. has made everything so much easier than it used to be in the 80s or 90s.
Life IS infinitely more convenient
and
A biproduct of that is missing out on things that are (or used to be) authentic experiences.
Is it a guarantee that going to the grocery store is certain to be a thrilling adventure whereas Instacart is ceratain not to be? Of course not. There is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life at the Grocery store just as there is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life dropping off your Instacart order. (We can argue about the relative percentages of each but that's not the point)
The point is not that convenience is bad but rather that the ubiquity of phones (on-demand apps, social media) in daily life removes a wide range of potential emotional outcomes from daily life as a result of the fact that nothing is rare anymore. Nothing.
I never understood this either. I sleep well, work 8 hours, meal prep my meals, work out a few days a week, have outdoor and indoor hobbies, meet up with friends at least weekly, and still have more time than I know what to do with.
This didn't "just happen". I made choices all life long, and continue to make choices to change my circumstances to build and to have the life and lifestyle I want.
Deeper. The only significance of the Planck length is that at that scale quantum effects and gravitational effects matter equally. Essentially that's where our current theories break down.
Beyond that, the Planck length means nothing. It's not the smallest length possible, it's just that we don't know how to describe anything smaller at the moment.
My understanding is that it is impossible to probe anything smaller than a Planck length because the required energy to probe such a small distance would create a black hole. So it is almost as if the universe conspires to prevent probing anything smaller.
Sorry for being vague. I meant LoRA, but used Apple as an example because their demo showed the potential. At a conceptual level, you can finetune a base model to be good at a specific task - eg: summarization, proofreading, generation etc. These finetuned weights are at the top layer and can be replaced by other weights for a different task as needed. Apple demoed different tasks by showcasing how their model identifies the task and then chooses the right set of finetuned weights. Apple called it Adapters as it comes via LoRA (Low Rank Adapters). It's around for some time, but only shot into prominence after people got some idea on how to use it.
> Our foundation models are fine-tuned for users’ everyday activities, and can dynamically specialize themselves on-the-fly for the task at hand. We utilize adapters, small neural network modules that can be plugged into various layers of the pre-trained model, to fine-tune our models for specific tasks. For our models we adapt the attention matrices, the attention projection matrix, and the fully connected layers in the point-wise feedforward networks for a suitable set of the decoding layers of the transformer architecture.
Not Apple adapters per-se, but LoRA adapters. It’s a way of fine tuning a model such that you keep the base weights unchanged but then keep a smaller set of tuned weights to help you on specific tasks.
(Edit) Apple is using them in their Apple Intelligence, hence the association. But the technique was around before.
In what way would self driving cars incentivize not owning your own car?